Although I have never derezzed a Vanilla (like, why?) if you’re trying to kill all the ICE, FAO can’t kill Vanilla. This is important for Crims that pay 2 cred to break subs on barriers.
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Okay, I accept maybe there’s a niche case here. But we’re discussing using Inside Job plus a two influence card, or a truck load of money with a bird breaker, to get rid of…Vanilla. Why not spend that two influence on, say, Corroder?
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I guess as a consolation, headlock Reina makes vanilla cost 1?
Too bad that deck probably isn’t playable after the MWL.
I mean, you are right. It sort of reminds me of Immolation run . There are situations where “click to destory ice” is hot, but the trick is managing those situations.
A “real game” example would be inside job a 1 advance teki agenda (prob nisei project). They let you past the ice, rez caprice. Afterwards, if you have this card, you can trash the ice, run caprice 2 more times. If you don’t, you have to pay your way through the ice each time, which is usually not a thing that happens.
Alternatively, there are the obvious synergies with emergency shutdown, crescentus. Crescentus + this + breakers is a straight up “destroy any ice” combo. Run it, beat it, derez it, next click trash it. Take that architect.
I don’t think that this is a winner, but it is another part of an early game dominance deck. I don’t think those decks are presently strong enough to pilot, but if I go blitz at some future point I’ll take a look at this card.
Bottom line: A card that trashes ice will always deserve careful consideration.
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En Passant is crazy, don’t get it twisted. It warps corp behavior, I know I won’t be happy when it’s released
En Passant is by far the most destructive against decks that run low ice counts. Sure it may not have cost much to install the ice, but losing it can be extremely very damaging.
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I agree, En Passant looks weak.
I think it has more of a place with criminals with derez effects than in an Anarch deck with better ways to trash ICE. That said, the 2 influence cost is pretty lame and there are almost certainly better cards that could take the card slot/influence in a criminal deck with derez effects.
The only point I can find in EP’s favor is: corps have been favoring low-cost ICE for a while now. It seems to be a thing of the past to use FAO on a Heimdal or Hadrian’s Wall, or even an Ichi 2.0. EP offers a means to trash low-mid cost taxing ICE, like Eli. These ICE aren’t necessarily locking a runner out of a server, but they are annoying/costly to break through repeatedly.
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I would agree if not for the stipulations on En Passant. Removing a low-cost, annoying ice would be a good effect, but it requires, somehow, getting past said ice without it being rezzed. When the corp can’t afford to rez that dirt cheap ice, Forged seems stronger (particularly given the influence cost). Where they can afford to rez the ice, the combo of Inside Job (hoping the corp doesn’t rez) or a de-rez effect seems convoluted and therefore weak.
So yes, I agree in principle this lets you remove troublesome low-cost ice. In practice it really doesn’t, or no more than something like Forged Activation Orders would.
I think we are in the same place with regards to En Passant. It is a weak card with an effect that could sometimes be useful, but it requires some situation where the runner is already winning, or some silly combo that could be something more universally useful, or just good breakers given criminal’s tight influence situation.
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This might’ve been said, but I just want to throw out there that they had a chance to make a card that actually synergized with Khan falcon shenanigans (tangent; gauntlet lol), and then decided to shuff it over to anarch.
I mean Christ Reina is half foot out the door; why is she still getting cards? 
I guess Gauntlet makes more sense if you believe HQI will be rotating soon.
I don’t actually think gauntlet is a bad card; hell, if it wasn’t for smoke, I’d say it was the best green card in the pack.
But it has zero synergy with Khan and falcons, that’s for sure.
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Wow. As strong as Power Shutdown for 0, but paying 2c instead of 1c. Great card.
I don’t know. En Passant has me excited to try it out in some older cred denial Anarch builds that got hit pretty hard by MWL. Because of En Passant, its possible now to have more than x2 parasites for ice destruction, which is exciting. Especially since the deck already packs DDoS x3.
Its probably still not a competitive deck in the meta anymore, but its probably worth testing.
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I’m missing something here.
How does the runner survive a psychic field with fumiko if he doesn’t have like a plascrete or so?
Can’t the corp decide the order of its own triggers even during the runners turn?
Because Corroder can’t also destroy Quandary.
Also, we’re talking about Crim here. Their influence spend should be as impactful as possible. I’d rather go with a Crim breaker suite and import support cards than import breakers and recursion. (Unless you want to lose when your single Corroder is destroyed, which is actually a stance several Crim decks take: Corroder destroyed? Oh well, gg.)
Look, En Passant is not a power card. It’s a Flexibility card. It doesn’t work on its own for the reasons you already said. (If they can’t afford to rez, FAO works better out of Crim anyway.) Inside Job is the worst combo piece to use with this. Crescentus and Emergency Shutdown are way better. (Run HQ, break ICE, successful Run, Emergency Shutdown, En Passant.)
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Fumiko triggers when you reveal the credits, Psychic Field doesn’t set the net damage until after that point.
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That costs no influence and you get to choose which card is trashed instead of the Runner…
Power Shutdown in a vacuum is a better card because it’s way easier to hit higher values by trashing more cards out of stack than it is to hit higher values by sticking tags.
But if your gameplan is about sticking tags, then Best Defense is fine, with a couple of ‘acceptably bad’ worse-case uses. So out of SYNC makes a lot of sense.
To put it another way, the ceiling is really high, and the floor isn’t that low, either.
It’s also really amusing against DLR decks.
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That was just semi-trolling 
That said, power shutdown decks are not the great danger they were.
I’m think tagging for X is harder than trashing top X cards. I think that X is a harder number to be reached with tags than with cards.
So I’m not sure a Best Defense spam would be very harmfull or a particularely good silver bullet card like @Calimsha seems to tell on R4G : clic credit, clic credit, play Best Defense seems too close of losing a corp turn to me.
(not sure.)
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[quote=“Syntax, post:1686, topic:7403”]
I think that X is a harder number to be reached with tags than with cards.
[/quote]you’d rather trash a bunch of cards from R&D for the chance the runner picks the one card you want them to trash instead of just playing Midseasons?